This course will examine how twentieth and twenty-first century authors have taken the experience of the broader world as their theme, demonstrating the various cultural, historical and global realities and issues that have impacted the production, circulation and reception of literary texts from around the globe in what is now called, World Literature. We will explore in a comparative manner how texts from China, Japan, India, Turkey, South and North Africa and the Arab world have traveled through time and space to become part of the great shelves of Western Europe and the contemporary global literary market. Of particular interest to our study in this class will be questions about the practice of reading, translation and comparison in conjugation with the challenges and realities of the contemporary world, including migratory displacements, civil wars and populous revolt, environmental degradation and the rising spread of global pandemics.

Introduction to environmental literature. What complicates the representation of nature in our languages? What strategies have writers around the world used to evoke ideas of beauty, wilderness, the pastoral, climate, and catastrophe? Primary texts of fiction, non-fiction, sound, and film. Emphasis on critical analysis, writing exercises, and reading methods.

Are we entering a posthuman era? This course will focus on recent science fiction literature, along with a few films, that draw on current questions and concerns regarding what it means to be human. We will also examine key theoretical texts regarding technology and the posthuman. In the wake of the digital revolution we encounter both hopes that humans can achieve great things that would never before have seemed possible, along with fears that much of our understanding of what it means to be human is being eroded, even that “the human” may becoming superfluous. At the same time, humans are questioning the status of homo sapiens as the pinnacle of the living world, wondering if we are really such a special category of living organisms. Literary science fiction is a form of cultural representation in which many of these questions and ideas of the status of the human find expression. Representative science fiction authors include: H.P. Lovecraft, Ted Chiang, Jeff Vandermeer, Kathe Koja, Michael Marrak, China Miéville, Neil Gaiman. Representative theorists include: Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles.